I was waiting for her at the airport when she arrived. I watched as she switched on her phone immediately upon entering the arrivals hall. I saw the expectation that the message signal brought to her face, and then I saw it disappear when she realised that the call was from me.
“You didn’t leave a message,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I dialled your number by mistake.”
She re-recorded her standard message in the car on the way home: “You have reached the voicemail of Dr Vasinthe Kumar. For urgent medical enquiries, please call 011 776 9132 or 011 776 9133. For urgent academic enquiries, please call 011 761 7595. Otherwise, please leave a message here. Thank you.”
As a final act of the day, Kagiso stretches, as if trying to span a continent, towards the postcard of home on the bookshelf. He transfers it carefully to the desk in front of him before falling, knees first, onto the mattress on the floor, asleep before his face touches the pillow.
The Karoo
1989. Slogans resounded across the country.
‘We will not forget?’
‘Steve Biko!’
‘Long live?’
‘Nelson Mandela, long live!’
‘We Shall Overcome!’
‘Liberation before?’
‘Education!’
‘The People Shall?’
‘Govern!’
‘We will not forget?’
‘Matthew Goniwe!’
‘We will not forget?’
‘Hector Pieterson!’
‘Viva?’
‘Oliver Tambo, viva!’
‘Long live?’
‘Govan Mbeki, long live!’
‘Amandla!’
Freedom is taken, never given.
‘Awethu!’
IN DECEMBER, AT THE END OF THE disrupted academic year, they reverse the summer holiday routine of their childhood and set off once again on the long drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg, a 1 500-kilometre journey north-east along the N1, the main national road that runs for days through the vast, arid centre of the country. You can follow its route on a map, as Kagiso now did, wistfully tracing its path with a slender finger from its starting point at the foot of Table Mountain, distracting himself from Issa’s loud ominous silence.
They know the mammoth journey like they do their garden path – Cape Town / Paarl / Worcester / Laingsburg / Beaufort West / Colesberg / Bloemfontein / Winburg / Ventersburg / Kroonstad / Johannesburg – backwards and forwards, eyes closed; summer school holidays were spent traversing its harsh unending miles to get to the coast. Then Vasinthe would drive, vrou alleen, as men observed admiringly, with the boys in the back and Gloria’s constant presence by her side, ready to make conversation, turn cassettes, pour cups of coffee or help keep an eye on the road:
“We need to watch out for kudus now.”
Why?
“Because they’re dangerous.”
But we’re in a car. And we’re going fast.
“That’s why they’re dangerous. If a kudu jumps into the road, this car will fold like paper.”
But there’s a fence.
Gloria laughed dismissively. “That fence is for farm animals. It can’t keep back a kudu.”
Why not?
“Because a kudu is big and wild.”
Wild! The word thrilled him.
“Yes,” Gloria continued. “And with its strong hind legs it can stand right next to a fence three times as high as this one and just hop over.”
Wow! Kagiso, we have to look out for kudus. You look your side. I’ll look mine.
Except to buy petrol, about which they had no choice, they avoided the verkrampte little dorps that occasionally interrupted the otherwise relentless isolation of the journey. Vasinthe always imagined that she would have time, to explain. Gloria agreed that it should come from her, that she should be the one to inform them about the way things were. She knew the dates and the facts and the names. She had them all in her head and at the tips of her fingers; could summon them like she does surgical instruments in an operating theatre. She would be much better at it.
Vasinthe thought constantly about what she would say when the time came. She tried to anticipate how it would arise, how she would phrase things, what questions they might ask. She anguished about not leaving them feeling angry or inferior. These were often among her first thoughts of the day as she tied her sari, while sometimes inadvertently humming her favourite morning bhajan from childhood. She’d rehearse her explanation while she walked the gleaming corridors of Jo’burg General, a time when she also remembered her father. He used the theatre of the hospital to distract her, following the delayed admission of her broken-bodied mother:
“Watch, Sinth!” he said to her when they were expelled from her ward by a cacophony of bleeping machines: “Doctors Laategan, Du Preez and Smidt to ICU! Doctors Laategan, Du Preez and Smidt to ICU!”
“Look,” he prodded her, “here they come.”
She saw a group of earnest, marching medics come rushing down the corridor towards them, their unflinching sights set on the finishing line, the threshold of her mother’s room.
“See their white coats flapping, Sinth. See their stethoscopes.”
“What, Baba?”
“Ste tha scopes.”
“Ste tha scopes,” she repeated.
“Good girl. Come. Step aside now.” He pulled her towards him as if from the path of a speeding car. As it rushed down the corridor towards them, the group reshaped itself into a lean line of hierarchy, a white-coated stethoscoped streak, which flashed past them and disappeared into her mother’s ward, leaving a foreboding gust of wind in their wake that chilled her father to the bone.
“Did you see that, Sinth?” he asked, summoning the excitement of a spectator at Kyalami.
She nodded. “Yes, Baba. I saw,” then threw her arms around his knees.
He crouched and ran his trembling fingers through her windblown hair. “Would you like to be like them one day, Sinth? What could be more important than rushing to save a life?”
And so it was that, as his wife, his ‘Mumtaz’, lay dying, her ‘Shah Jahan’, who within a month would die a premature, brokenhearted death, opened a door in their only daughter’s mind as they sat huddled in a long, gleaming hospital corridor.
“Yes, Baba,” she said.
He lifted her chin and wiped the dust from her cheek with a licked wet thumb. “Good girl,” he said. “Very good girl.”
Vasinthe would run over her explanation in her mind while she checked their homework before she herself sat down to a long night of study. But whatever her preferred choice of words – it changed from day to day – in the end she always decided to leave it till they were a little older. For the moment, she just wanted them to be children. She had herself known too soon:
“Baba. Why isn’t the ambulance taking Ma?”
He didn’t look at her. “They’re sending another one, Sinth. That one is full,” he said as he sat down in the sand to stroke her mother’s limp arm.
“But there was no one in it, Baba. I saw.”
“Come Sinth, hold Ma’s other hand so she can feel you near.” He pulled her towards them. “The other ambulance will be here soon.
It wasn’t. For nearly two hours they crouched in the heat and dust by the roadside next to their wrecked car before the non-white ambulance arrived.
But when the time for explanations came, Vasinthe was asleep.
December 1977. It is a hot day. When they arrive in Victoria West, Vasinthe stops for a break in the shade of the trees by the white graveyard. She and Gloria watch from the car as Issa leads Kagiso by the hand to the small store just across the road. Though the younger by two months, Issa is by far the more confident of the two.
They have promised to cross the road carefully. They will buy their iced lollies, not forgetting to say please and thank you, and return immediately to perch themselves on the low wall beside the car. They
will sit quietly; they are not at home now. They disappear into the store. Vasinthe reclines her seat and shuts her eyes. Gloria rolls down her window and remains vigilant.
The boys re-emerge from the store, empty-handed. They walk hesitantly to a barred window at the side of the building and join the short queue. Gloria looks down at Vasinthe whose lips have quickly started to puff the way they do when she is on the verge of sleep; the early morning delivery of Christmas hampers to Taung followed by a visit to the Open Mine Museum in Kimberley was perhaps too ambitious for one driver, in one day.
Gloria slips quietly out of the car and joins the boys in the queue. Issa relinquishes control and slips his hand into hers.
When Gloria steps to the front of the queue she assesses the dark interior of the store through the black bars. It is a general store, selling basic provisions as well as some cooking utensils, paraffin stoves, toolboxes, a couple of bicycles. She asks for two iced lollies. Asseblief. The shop assistant retrieves the lollies from a noisy refrigerator and lays them down on the dirty wooden plank that serves as a counter.
“Dankie.” Gloria lays down R70 on the counter. The assistant is surprised. This is far in excess of the cost of two iced lollies. Gloria adds to the order. “And a bicycle. Asseblief.”
Issa looks up questioningly at Gloria but knows not to interrupt. She pats his hand, still clenched in hers, reassuringly on her thigh. Kagiso has started whispering reluctant responses to a dirty little girl in the queue.
“For the bicycle, you can come around the front.” The shop assistant reaches for the money. Gloria slaps her hand down on it. The woman looks up at her, startled.
“I’ll take it through the window. Asseblief.”
The shop assistant is taken aback. A crowd of curiosity has gathered. Somebody quickly whispers an update to the newcomers. “The bicycle is too big to pass through the window. You’ll have to come around the front to get it.”
Gloria edges the money forward without releasing her grip on the notes. “Then disassemble it. Asseblief.” The crowd murmurs incredulity. Issa studies their rough, leathery faces, their toothless smiles, their threadbare, tattered rags, then looks to the woman behind the counter.
“That’s impossible. I can’t dismantle the bicycle. You’ll have to collect it from the front. It’s not far. You only have to walk around the corner.”
“If you can’t dismantle the bicycle, then you’ll have to break down these bars.”
The assistant splutters in disbelief. “But that’s mos malligheid. You expect me to break down these bars because you won’t come round the front to fetch the bicycle?”
Gloria lays out another R20 on the counter. The crowd gasps. “You won’t break down these bars, but you will break the law by bringing me into the front of your shop.” The lollies have started to melt on the grimy counter. A frenzy of flies buzzes erratically around the sweet sticky water.
Kagiso has tired of the little girl who won’t believe that they are from Johannesburg, that that is their car, that this is his brother. “Maar hy’s ’n coolie en jy’s ’n kaffir,” she objects. “Hy’t dan gladde hare, en joune is kroeser dan myne!” the girl remarks, pointing to the difference in the texture of the boys’ hair. Kagiso tries to enlist Issa’s support, but is brushed off.
“The law doesn’t stop you from coming into the front of the shop.”
“What does?”
“My husband. And you’d better stop playing these silly games. He’ll be back soon.”
“Then I’ll wait.” The crowd gasps. Gloria tightens her grip on Issa’s hand. He watches the sweat trickle from her perspiring palm down his wrist. Soon his hand starts to go numb, but he doesn’t attempt to release it. Instead, he shifts his weight to the other leg as a sort of ineffective distraction and, with his left hand, traces the patterns on her printed skirt.
“Then step aside and let me serve the rest of the people in the queue.” Gloria turns around and scans the onlookers. Nobody steps forward. She repositions herself at the head.
When her husband arrives, the woman reports the deadlock. The man assesses Gloria and the boys. He looks over to the car parked under the trees. “That your car?”
“Yes.”
“Very nice. Jo’burg plates?”
“Yes.”
“Going to Cape Town?”
“Yes.”
“Where will you put the bike?”
“We’ll make space.”
“These your boys?”
“Yes.”
“Him too?” Issa glares at the man from under a furrowed brow.
“Yes.”
Kagiso nudges the dirty girl. “Now do you believe me?”
The man looks at Gloria then at the crowd behind her. He steps back from the counter. He looks at his wife, then turns back to face Gloria.
“The bicycles are sold.”
The woman looks surprised.
“Yes. I sold them this morning, before you came in, to Jan from Soetfontein. He bought them for his boys, for Christmas. I forgot to tell you.”
Vasinthe is woken by the sound of closing doors. “Ready?” she asks sleepily.
“Yes,” says Gloria. “Let’s go.”
On the back seat, Kagiso taps Issa for answers, explanations. But Issa looks past him at the crowd outside the shop. Some start to trail away. Others take up their places obediently in the queue. Issa sees the dirty little girl stoop to pick up the remnants of the molten lollies as the woman in the shop brushes them off the counter and onto the dusty pavement. The girl steps out of the crowd and watches them drive away, holding her salvaged lollies in upturned palms. When they have left the town behind, Ma Vasinthe taps her thumbs on the steering wheel to initiate another sing-a-long:
“We’re all goin’ on a summer holiday / No more workin’ for a...”
But Issa doesn’t join in. He turns away from Kagiso to look out at the dry and barren wilderness that stretches out eternally beyond the windows of their speeding car.
Now, more than a decade later with Issa at the wheel, they are able to anticipate every ridge and bend, peak and valley, as the road cuts its dramatic path from Paarl across the Hottentots’ Holland Mountains – eventual refuge of the indigenous Khoi expelled from the ever-growing Dutch settlement – and into the picturesque valleys of the hinterland, before eventually reaching up through the Hexrivierberg Pass and out onto the great escarpment. They take the longer route across Du Toit’s Kloof Pass, avoiding the new tunnel that cuts through the bowels of the mountain and to which Issa is still not reconciled; a few months earlier he had joined in the demonstrations organised to coincide with President Botha’s ceremonial opening of the tunnel. Why the Huguenot Tunnel? Has nothing happened in the 300 years since their arrival that might also merit remembering? Had they not received enough recognition, enough recompense – a pristine corner of the world’s fairest Cape, forever named Franschhoek, on which to start an industry that would make them wealthy beyond their persecuted Protestant dreams? How many refugees get a clean slate, let alone such a fabulous one?
As they wind their way slowly through history’s majestic backdrops, Kagiso stares out of the window at the fertile valleys of pristine vineyards and orchards unfolding below. This is his favourite part of the journey.
He can’t imagine anywhere being more beautiful and sighs despondently when they arrive in Laingsburg.
But for Issa, Laingsburg is where the real journey begins. Relieved finally to have left behind all the deceptive liberal prettiness of the Cape – the picturesque wine farms, where labourers are paid by the tot; the plush southern suburbs, whose residents know little of the squalor and violence that afflicts their neighbours in the slums of the Cape Flats. Even the breathtaking panoramas from Table Mountain, which also reveal the black hole in the middle of the bay into which his hero has been sucked. What lies ahead is the harsh, honest isolation of the Great Karoo, where everything is exactly as it appears, unforgiving, dry, vast, desolate. He prefers it.
Can position himself in relation to it. Death Run looms ahead. He isn’t daunted because it does not conceal what it is, makes no pretences, has no hidden little catches. To him, the desert is an honest landscape.
In junior school he does all his geography tasks on deserts: Sahara is the Arabic for desert; Dune 7 in the Namib, biggest dune on earth in the oldest desert on earth – it never changes shape; the Kalahari grows by a phenomenal two centimetres a year. He calculates that, at that rate, it would take ten million years to travel two thousand kilometres to the Cape. The Karoo gets its name from the Khoi word, karo, meaning dry. But it was once an endless lake. Fossils of aquatic life have been found on what was once the bottom of the lake but is now the surface of the desert. It covers one-third of the country’s surface. He wishes one day to see its illusive hare. His teacher eventually forces another topic on him:
But I like deserts, Teacher.
“Yes, I know that Issa, but what I don’t understand is why you like them so much.”
Issa looks at her, deciding whether to trust her with a piece of himself. Because they’re clean, Teacher.
The class explodes with laughter. Kagiso lowers his head.
“Silence!” the teacher shouts, knocking her ruler on the board. “Silence!” When an uneven quiet has hissed through the class, she returns her attention to Issa. “That is a strange answer, Issa. Tell us, what makes you say so?”
The whole class turns to look at Issa.
“Issa?” the teacher calls out. “Stand up when I’m talking to you.”
Issa stands.
“Now,” the teacher repeats, “tell us why you think that deserts are clean.”
But Issa doesn’t respond. He just stares back at the teacher over the heads of his bursting-to-laugh classmates.
Silent Minaret Page 4